Victims of Our Own Imagination

Most of our thoughts are not of the here and now. If the past is a another country, we are foreigners in our own skins there, contact with our present and actual self always in danger of splintering under the weight. As the past drags behind, the future looms before us, drawing our eyes. Sometimes with promise, sometimes foreboding and threat. But this is all in our minds, it is how we imagine things to have been; it is what we hope or we fear will come. Lost in these projections of a life, what actually is dissolves or shatters, we don't even experience it much of the time. We chase after what isnt (yet) real and never can be real for us if we are always off chasing after figments and not in the herenow. We are the victims of our own imaginations.

We always seem to see ourselves (and others) through this prism of could have been, should have been, might be, will be, could be, ought to be, cannot be, never will be. All of this wraps us in narratives of hope and longing, expectation and anxiety, fear, resentment and anger; ever flailing around in a reality that doesnt match what we think it should be, what we are deep down convinced we ought to be but never are, maybe never can be. We are the victims of our own imaginations.

It is strange if this is right that drug use becomes a solution to the suffering this way of being in the world produced. At least for many drugs. You'd think enhanced imaginative capacity could only worsen it. But maybe the euphoria or the calm or the other intense positive feelings that a high can produce somehow wash out the negatives? Or in sufficiently high doses maybe almost any psychoactive drug helps us lose our attachment to our self (or the self itself in some cases) and thus the projections become more an entertainment than a way to elaborate on our own and the world's insufficiencies.

But then drug addiction could also be a way to tame all this, contain it, make things seem more under our control. If I can just get that next hit, when I can pick up, if my veins cooperate, if the shit isnt stomped so bad this time... The scope of our projected world simplifies to the necessities of the drug need. A narrowing of focus that may allow some feeling of control over the madness of constant nothing is good enough. But that is a delusion. We are still the victims of our own imaginations.

How to crawl out from under our own minds then? I wish I knew. And there it is. Me, wishing and not just being ok with what actually is. Still imagination's victim.

I think pretty much all addictions stem from unhappiness within to some extent, for the reasons you've stated already, people suffer mentally with their own thoughts and if your solution is to try and escape your mind then it's just a matter of time before you come across the right substance to do that for you effectively. Heroin is probably the most effective at numbing any kind of pain and if anything your consciousness (or ability to care about anything else anyway) probably decreases, making it the perfect drug for that.

I think consciousness expanding drugs like weed and DMT can be good for escapism but a lot of people eventually stop taking them because they start to cause anxiety. Maybe the possibilities they open in the mind mean that people start to become too detached from their normal reality (of the prism you describe) and become anxious that they're 'losing it' slightly. Ignorance is probably bliss sometimes being more conscious and having enhanced imagination takes people to the wrong places, especially those that like to over think on a deep level. I think I ended up on heroin after getting into a bad place taking psychedelics and getting detached, obviously heroin just made everything far worse eventually.